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Cobb'^s Anatomy 




Cobb's Anatomy 

By 

Irvin S, Cobb 

Author of ''Back Home'' 

Illustrated by Peter Newell 




New York 
George H. Doran Company 



Copyright, 1912, 
By The Curtis Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1912, 
By George H. Doran Company 






©CI.A328313 



Cobb'^s Anatomy 



To 
G. H. L. 

Who Stood Godfather 
TO These Contents 



CobPs Anatomy 



PREFACE 



This Space To-Let to Any Reputable 

Party Desiring a Good 

Preface 



Cobb^s Anatomy 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Tummies 3 

II. Teeth ....... 33 

III. Hair . . . . . . .69 

IV. Hands and Feet . . , .107 



Cobb''s Anatomy 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

''Does he have to take the tailor's word for it that 
his trousers need pressing?" 5 ,^ 

"Not in these times when dancing is a cross be- 
tween a wrestling match, a contortion act and a 
trip on a roller-coaster." 25 

"Cut them with some such mussy thing as the 
horny part of a nurse's thumb." 37 i/ 

"And our face folds up on us like a crush hat or a 
concertina." 41 "^ 

"Ponto came out . . . and bit him severely in 
the calf of the leg." 45 "^ 

"Listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition." 49 V 

"At this moment the dog trees the woodchuck at 
the base of that cherished tooth." 53 i^' 

"It takes a fond and doting parent to detect evi- 
dences of an actual human aspect in us." 73 "^ 

"While I stood admiringly by and watched the 
long yellow curls fall writhing upon the floor.".. 79 ^ 

"The way she carried on was scandalous and ill- 
timed." .83 '^ 



CobPs Anatomy 



ILL VSTRATIONS— Continued 



PAGE 

"Every face fell into one of three classes, it being 
either a square, a round or a squirrel." 89 

"When my back is turned he grabs up his powder ^ 

swab and makes a quick swoop upon me.'^ 97 

"There'd be twice as many hands to wash when 
company was coming to dinner." iii 

"The presence of a soiled rag round a finger gives 
to a boy's hand a touch of distinctiveness." 1 15 

"These gifted mortals are not common." ii9 

"We don't know what to do with our hands?**. . . 123 

"I don't think IVe seen a jumpman's nails in such 
a state for ever so long." 129 ^ 



Cobb''s Anatomy 



TUMMIES 




Cobb's Anatomy 



Tummies 

DR. WOODS HUTCHINSON says 
that fat people are happier than 
other people. How does Dr. 
Woods Hutchinson know? Did he ever 
have to leave the two top buttons of his vest 
unfastened on account of his extra chins? 
Has the pressure from within against the 
waistband where the watchfob is located 
ever been so great in his case that he had 
partially to undress himself to find out what 
time it was? Does he have to take the 
tailor's word for it that his trousers need 
pressing? 

He does not. And that sort of a remark 
is only what might be expected from any 
person upward of seven feet tall and weigh- 
ing about ninety-eight pounds with his 
heavy underwear on. I shall freely take 
Dr. Woods Hutchinson's statements on the 



4 Cobb^'s Anatomy 

joys and ills of the thin. But when he un- 
dertakes to tell me that fat people are hap- 
pier than thin people, it is only hearsay 
evidence with him and I decline to accept 
his statements unchallenged. He is going 
outside of his class. He is, as you might 
say, no more than an innocent bystander. 
Whereas I am a qualified authority. 

I will admit that at one stage of my life, 
I regarded fleshiness as a desirable asset. 
The incident came about in this way. There 
was a circus showing in our town and a 
number of us proposed to attend it. It was 
one of those one-ring, ten-cent circuses that 
used to go about over the country, and it is 
my present recollection that all of us had 
funds laid by sufficient to buy tickets; but 
if we could procure admission in the regu- 
lar way we felt it would be a sinful waste of 
money to pay our way in. 

With this idea in mind we went scouting 
round back of the main tent to a compara- 
tively secluded spot, and there we found a 
place where the canvas side-wall lifted clear 
of the earth for a matter of four or five 
inches. We held an informal caucus to 



C-^^^ 





"DOES HE HAVE TO TAKE THE TAILOR'S ^VORD FOR IT 
THAT HIS TROUSERS NEED PRESSING ? " 



Tummies 7 



decide who should go first. The honor lay 
between two of us — between the present 
writer, who was reasonably skinny, and an- 
other boy, named Thompson, who was even 
skinnier. He won, as the saying is, on form. 
It was decided by practically a unanimous 
vote, he alone dissenting, that he should 
crawl under and see how the land lay inside. 
If everything was all right he would make 
it known by certain signals and we would 
then follow, one by one. 

Two of us lifted the canvas very gently 
and this Thompson boy started to wriggle 
under. He was about halfway in when — zip ! 
— like a flash he bodily vanished. He was 
gone, leaving only the marks where his toes 
had gouged the soil. Startled, we looked 
at one another. There was something pe- 
culiar about this. Here was a boy who had 
started into a circus tent in a circumspect, 
indeed, a highly cautious manner, and then 
finished the trip with undue and sudden 
precipitancy. It was more than peculiar — 
it bordered upon the uncanny. It was sin- 
ister. Without a word having been spoken 
we decided to go away from there. 



8 Cobb^s Anatomy 

Wearing expressions of intense uncon- 
cern and sterling innocence upon our young 
faces we did go away from there and drifted 
back in the general direction of the main 
entrance. We arrived just in time to meet 
our young friend coming out. He came 
hurriedly, using his hands and his feet both, 
his feet for traveling and his hands for rub- 
bing purposes. Immediately behind him 
was a large, coarse man using language that 
stamped him as a man who had outgrown 
the spirit of youth and was preeminently 
out of touch with the ideals and aims of boy- 
hood. 

At that period it seemed to me and to the 
Thompson boy, who was moved to speak 
feelingly on the subject, and in fact to all of 
us, that excessive slimness might have its 
drawbacks. Since that time several of us 
have had occasion to change our minds. 
With the passage of years we have fleshened 
up, and now we know better. The last time 
I saw the Thompson boy he was known as 
Excess-Baggage Thompson. His figure \\\ 
profile suggested a man carrying a roll-top 
desk in his arms and his face looked like a 



Tummies 



face that had refused to jell and was about 
to run down on his clothes. He spoke long- 
ingly of the days of his youth and wondered 
if the shape of his knees had changed much 
since the last time he saw them. 

Yes sir, no matter what Doctor Hutch- 
inson says, I contend that the slim man has 
all the best of it in this world. The fat man 
is the universal goat; he is humanity's stand- 
ing joke. Stomachs are the curse of our 
modern civilization. When a man gets a 
stomach his troubles begin. If you doubt 
this ask any fat man — I started to say ask 
any fat woman, too. Only there aren't any 
fat women to speak of. There are women 
who are plump and will admit it; there are 
even women who are inclined to be stout. 
But outside of dime museums there are no 
fat women. But there are plenty of fat men. 
Ask one of them. Ask any one of them. 
Ask me. 

This thing of acquiring a tummy steals 
on one insidiously, like a thief in the night. 
You notice that you are plumping out a 
trifle and for the time being you feel a sort 
of small personal satisfaction in it. Your 



10 Cobb^s Anatomy 

shirts fit you better. You love the slight 
strain upon the buttonholes. You admire 
the pleasant plunking sound suggestive of 
ripe watermelons when you pat yourself. 
Then a day comes when the persuasive odor 
of mothballs fills the autumnal air and 
everybody at the barber shop is having the 
back of his neck shaved also, thus betoken- 
ing awakened social activities, and when 
evening is at hand you take the dress-suit, 
which fitted you so well, out of the closet 
where it has been hanging and undertake 
to back yourself into it. You are pained to 
learn that it is about three sizes too small. 
At first you are inclined to blame the suit 
for shrinking, but second thought convinces 
you that the fault lies elsewhere. It is you 
that have swollen, not the suit that has 
shrunk. The buttons that should adorn the 
front of the coat are now plainly visible 
from the rear. 

You buy another dress-suit and next fall 
you have out-grown that one too. You pant 
like a lizard when you run to catch a car. 
You cross your legs and have to hold the 
crossed one on with both hands to keep your 



Tummies 11 



stomach from shoving it off in space. After- 
awhile you quit crossing them and are con- 
tent with dawdling yourself on your own 
lap. You are fat! Dog-gone it — you are 
fat! 

You are up against it and it is up against 
you, which is worse. You are something for 
people to laugh at. You are also expected 
to laugh. It is all right for a thin man to 
be grouchy; people will say the poor crea- 
ture has dyspepsia and should be humored 
along. But a fat man with a grouch is inex- 
cusable in any company — there is so much 
of him to be grouchy. He constitutes a 
wave of discontent and a period of general 
depression.' He is not expected to be ro- 
mantic and sentimental either. It is all 
right for a giraffe to be sentimental, but not 
a hippopotamus. If you doubt me consult 
any set of natural history pictures. The 
giraffe is shown with his long and sinuous 
neck entwined in fond embrace about the 
neck of his mate; but the amphibious, 
blood-sweating hippo is depicted as spout- 
ing and wallowing, morose and misan- 
thropic, in a mud puddle off by himself. 



12 Cobb^s Anatomy 

In passing I may say that I regard this com- 
parison as a particularly apt one, because I 
know of no living creature so truly amphib- 
ious in hot weather as an open-pored fat 
m.an, unless it is a hippopotamus. 

Oh how true is the saying that nobody 
loves a fat man! When fat comes up on 
the front porch love jumps out of the third- 
story window. Love in a cottage? Yes. 
Love in a rendering plant? No. A fat 
man's heart is supposed to lie so far inland 
that the softer emotions cannot reach it at 
all. Yet the fattest are the truest, if you did 
but know it, and also they are the tenderest;X 
and a man with a double chin rarely leads 
a double life. For one thing, it requires ; 
too much moving round. 

A fat man cannot wear the clothes he 
would like to wear. As a race, fat men are 
fond of bright and cheerful colors; but no 
fat man can indulge his innocent desires in 
this direction without grieving his family 
and friends and exciting the derisive laugh- 
ter of the unthinking. If he puts on a fancy- 
flowered vest, they'll say he looks like a 
Hanging Garden of Babylon. And yet he 



Tummies 13 



has a figure just made for showing ofif a 
fancy-flowered vest to best effect. He may 
favor something in light checks for his 
spring suit; but if he ventures abroad in a 
checked suit, ribald strangers will look at 
him meaningly and remark to one another 
that the center of population appears to be 
shifting again. It has been my observation 
that fat men are instinctively drawn to short 
tan overcoats for the early fall. But a fat 
man in a short tan overcoat, strolling up the 
avenue of a sunny afternoon, will be con- 
stantly overhearing persons behind him 
wondering why they didn't wait until night 
to move the bank vault. That irks him sore; 
but if he turns round to reproach them he is 
liable to shove an old lady or a poor blind 
man ofif the sidewalk, and then, like as not, 
some gamin will sing out: ^^HuUy gee, 
Chimmy, wot's become of the rest of the 
parade? 'Ere's the bass drum goin' home 
all by itself." 

I've known of just such remarks being 
made and I assure you they cut a sensitive 
soul to the core. Not for the fat man are 
the snappy clothes for varsity men and the 



14 Cobb^s Anatomy 

patterns called by the tailors confined 
because that is what they should be, but 
aren't. Not for him the silken shirt with 
the broad stripes. Shirts with stripes that 
were meant to run vertically but are caused 
to run horizontally, by reasons over which 
the wearer has no control, remind others of 
the awning over an Italian grocery. So the 
fat man must stick to sober navy blues and 
depressing blacks and melancholy grays. 
He is advised that he should wear his even- 
ing clothes whenever possible, because black 
and white lines are more becoming to him. 
But even in evening clothes, that wide ex- 
panse of glazed shirt and those white 
enamel studs will put the onlookers in mind 
of the front end of a dairy lunch — or so 
I have been cruelly told. 

When planning public utilities, who 
thinks of a fat man? There never was a 
hansom cab made that would hold a fat 
man comfortably unless he left the doors 
open, and that makes him feel undressed. 
There never was an orchestra seat in a the- 
ater that would contain all of him at the 
same time— he churns up and sloshes out 



Tummies 15 



over the sides. Apartment houses and ele- 
vators and hotel towels are all constructed 
upon the idea that the world is populated 
by stock-size people with those double-A- 
last shapes. 

Take a Pullman car, for instance. One 
of the saddest sights known is that of a 
fat man trying to undress on one of those 
closet shelves called upper berths without 
getting hopelessly entangled in the ham- 
mock or committing suicide by hanging 
himself with his own suspenders. And after 
that, the next most distressing sight is the 
same fat man after he has undressed and is 
lying there, spouting like a sperm-whale 
and overflowing his reservation like a crock 
of salt-rising dough in a warm kitchen, and 
wondering how he can turn over without 
bulging the side of the car and maybe caus- 
ing a wreck. Ah me, those dark green cur- 
tains with the overcoat buttons on them hide 
many a distressful spectacle from the travel- 
ing public! 

If a fat man undertakes to reduce nobody 
sympathizes with him. A thin man trying 
to fatten up so he won't fall all the way 



16 Cobb'^s Anatomy 

through his trousers when he draws 'em on 
in the morning is an object of sympathy and 
of admiration, and people come from miles 
round and give him advice about how to 
do it. But suppose a fat man wants to train 
down to a point where, when he goes into 
a telephone booth and says ^^Ninety-four 
Broad," the spectators will know he is try- 
ing to get a number and not telling his tailor 
what his waist measure is. 

Is he greeted with sympathetic under- 
standing? He is not. He is greeted with 
derision and people stand round and gloat 
at him. The authorities recommend health 
exercises, but health exercises are almost in- 
variably undignified in effect and wearing 
besides. Who wants to greet the dewy morn 
by lying flat on his back and lifting his feet 
fifty times? What kind of a way is that 
to greet the dewy morn anyhow? And 
bending over with the knees stiff and touch- 
ing the tips of the toes with the tips of the 
fingers — that's no employment for a grown 
man with a family to support and a position 
to maintain in society. Besides which it can- 
not be done. I make the statement unequiv- 



Tummies 1 7 



ocally and without fear of successful contra- 
diction that it cannot be done. And if it 
could be done — which as I say it can't — 
there would be no real pleasure in touching 
a set of toes that one has known of only by 
common rumor for years. Those toes are 
the same as strangers to you — you knew they 
were in the neighborhood, of course, but 
you haven't been intimate with them. 

Maybe you try dieting, which is contrary 
to nature. Nature intended that a fat man 
should eat heartily, else why should she 
endow him with the capacity and the 
accommodations. Starving in the midst 
of plenty is not for him who has plenty 
of midst. Nature meant that a fat man 
should have an appetite and that he should 
gratify it at regular intervals — meant that 
he should feel like the Grand Caiion before 
dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterward. 
Anyhow, dieting for a fat man consists in 
not eating anything that's fit to eat. The 
specialist merely tells him to eat what a 
horse would eat and has the nerve to charge 
him for what he could have found out for 
himself at any livery stable. Of course he 



18 Cobb^s Anatomy 

might bant in the same way that a woman 
bants. You know how a woman bants. She 
begins the day very resolutely, and if you 
are her husband you want to avoid irritat- 
ing her or upsetting her, because hell hath 
no fury like a woman banting. For break- 
fast she takes a swallow of lukewarm water 
and half of a soda cracker. For luncheon 
she takes the other half of the cracker and 
leaves off the water. For dinner she orders 
everything on the menu except the date and 
the name of the proprietor. She does this 
in order to give her strength to go on with 
the treatment. 

No fat man would diet that way; but no 
matter which way he does diet it doesn't do 
him any good. Health exercises only make 
him muscle-sore and bring on what the 
Harvard ball team call the Charles W. 
Horse; while banting results in attacks of 
those kindred complaints — the MoUie K. 
Grubbs and the Fan J. Todds. 

Walking is sometimes recommended and 
the example of the camel is pointed out, the 
camel being a creature that can walk for 
days and days. But, as has been said by 



Tummies 19 



some thinking person, who in thunder 
wants to be a camel? The subject of horse- 
back riding is also brought up frequently 
in this connection. It is one of the common- 
est delusions among fat men that horseback 
riding will bring them down and make 
them sylphlike and willowy. I have sev- 
eral fat men among my lists of acquaint- 
ances who labor under this fallacy. None 
of them was ever a natural-born horseback 
rider; none of them ever will be. I like 
to go out of a bright morning and take a 
comfortable seat on a park bench — one 
park bench is plenty roomy enough if no- 
body else is using it — and sit there and 
watch these unhappy persons passing single 
file along the bridle-path. I sit there and 
gloat until by rights I ought to be required 
to take out a gloater's license. 

Mind you, I have no prejudice against 
horseback riding as such. Horseback rid- 
ing is all right for mounted policemen and 
Colonel W. F. Cody and members of the 
Stickney family and the party who used to 
play Mazeppa in the sterling drama of that 
name. That is how those persons make their 



20 Cobb^s Anatomy 

living. They are suited for it and accli- 
mated to it. It is also all right for eques- 
trian statues of generals in the Civil War. 
But it is not a fit employment for a fat man, 
and especially for a fat man who insists on 
trying to ride a hard-trotting horse English 
style, which really isn't riding at all when 
you come right down to cases, but an out- 
door cure for neurasthenia invented, I take 
it, by a British subject who was nervous 
himself and hated to stay long in one place. 
So, as I was saying, I sit there on my com- 
fortable park bench and watch those friends 
of mine bouncing by, each wearing on his 
face that set expression which is seen also 
on the faces of some men while waltzing, 
and on the faces of most women when en- 
tertaining their relatives by marriage. I 
have one friend who is addicted to this form 
of punishment in a violent, not to say a ma- 
lignant form. He uses for his purpose a 
tall and self-willed horse of the Tudor per- 
iod — a horse with those high dormer effects 
and a sloping mansard. This horse must 
have been raised, I think, in the knockabout 
song-and-dance business. Every time he 



Tummies 21 



hears music or thinks he hears it he stops 
and vamps with his feet. When he does 
this my friend bends forward and clutches 
him round the neck tightly. I think he 
is trying to whisper in the horse's ear and 
beg him in Heaven's name to forbear; but 
what he looks like is Santa Claus with a 
clean shave, sitting on the combing of a 
very steep house with his feet hanging over 
the eaves, peeking down the chimney to see 
if the children are asleep yet. When that 
horse dies he will still have finger marks 
on his throat and the authorities will sus- 
pect foul play probably. 

Once I tried it myself. I was induced to 
scale the heights of a horse that was built 
somewhat along the general idea of the 
Andes Mountains, only more rugged and 
steeper nearing the crest. From the ground 
he looked to be not more than sixteen hands 
high, but as soon as I was up on top of him 
I immediately discerned that it was not six- 
teen hands — it was sixteen miles. What I 
had taken for the horse's blaze face was a 
snow-capped peak. Miss Anna Peck might 
have felt at home up there, because she has 



22 CobPs Anatomy 

had the experience and is used to that sort 
of thing, but I am no mountain climber 
myself. 

Before I could make any move to descend 
to the lower and less rarified altitudes the 
horse began executing a few fancy steps, 
and he started traveling sidewise with a 
kind of a slanting bias movement that was 
extremely disconcerting, not to say alarm- 
ing, instead of proceeding straight ahead as 
a regular horse would. I clung there astrad- 
dle of his ridge pole, with my fingers 
twined in his mane, trying to anticipate 
where he would be next, in order to be there 
to meet him if possible; and I resolved 
right then that, if Providence in His wis- 
dom so willed it that I should get down 
from up there alive, I would never do so 
again. However, I did not express these 
longings in words — not at that time. At 
that time there were only two words in the 
English language which seemed to come to 
me. One of them was ^Whoa" and the 
other was ^^Ouch," and I spoke them alter- 
nately with such rapidity that they merged 
into the compound word ^^Whouch," which 



Tummies 23 



is a very expressive word and one that I 
would freely recommend to others who may 
be situated as I was. 

At that moment, of all the places in the 
world that I could think of — and I could 
think of a great many because the events of 
my past life were rapidly flashing past me — 
as is customary, I am told, in other cases 
of grave peril, such as drowning — I say of 
all the places in the world there were just 
two where I least desired to be — one was up 
on top of that horse and the other was down 
under him. But it seemed to be a choice 
of the two evils, and so I chose the lesser 
and got under him. I did this by a simple 
expedient that occurred to me at the mo- 
ment. I fell off. I was tramped on con- 
siderably, and the earth proved to be harder 
than it looked when viewed from an ap- 
proximate height of sixteen miles up, but 
I lived and breathed — or at least I breathed 
after a time had clasped — and I was sat- 
isfied. And so, having gone through this 
experience myself, I am in position to ap- 
preciate what any other man of my general 
build is going through as I see him bobbing 



24 Cobb^s Anatomy 

by — the poor martyr, sacrificing himself as 
a burnt offering, or anyway a blistered one 
— on the high altar of a Gothic ruin of a 
horse. And, besides, I know that riding a 
horse doesn't reduce a fat man. It merely 
reduces the horse. 

So it goes — the fat man is always up 
against it. His figure is half-masted in re- 
gretful memory of the proportions he had 
once, and he is made to mourn. Most sports 
and many gainful pursuits are closed against 
him. He cannot play lawn tennis, or, at 
least according to my observation, he can- 
not play lawn tennis oftener than once in 
two weeks. In between games he limps 
round, stifif as a hat tree and sore as a mashed 
thumb. Time was when he might mingle 
in the mystic mazes of the waltz, tripping 
the light fantastic toe or stubbing it, as the 
case may be. But that was m the days of 
the old-fashioned square dance, which was 
the fat man's friend among dances, and also 
of the old-fashioned two-step, and not in 
these times when dancing is a cross between 
a wrestling match, a contortion act and a 
trip on a roller-coaster, and is either named 




"NOT IN THESE TIMES WHEN DANCING IS A CROSS 
BETWEEN A WRESTLING MATCH, A CONTORTION ACT 
AND A TRIP ON A ROLLER-COASTER" 



Tummies 21 



for an animal, like the Bunny Hug and the 
Tarantula Glide, or for a town, like the 
Mobile Mop-Up, and the Far Rockaway 
Rock and the South Bend Bend. His 
friends would interfere — or the authorities 
would. He can go in swimming, it is true; 
but if he turns over and floats, people yell 
out that somebody has set the life raft 
adrift; and if he basks at the water's edge, 
boats will come in and try to dock along- 
side him; and if he takes a sun bath on the 
beach and sunburns, there's so everlasting 
much of him to be sunburned that he prac- 
tically amounts to a conflagration. He can't 
shoot rapids, craps or big game with any 
degree of comfort; nor play billiards. He 
can't get close enough to the table to make 
the shots, and he puts all the English on 
himself and none of it on the cue ball. 

Consider the gainful pursuits. Think 
how many of them are denied to the man 
who may have energy and ability but is 
shut out because there are a few extra ter- 
races on his front lawn. A fat man cannot 
be a leading man in a play. Nobody desires 
a fat hero for a novel. A fat man cannot go 



28 Cobb^s Anatomy 

in for aeroplaning. He cannot be a wire- 
walker or a successful walker of any of the 
other recognized brands — track, cake, sleep 
or floor. He doesn't make a popular waiter. 
Nobody wants a fat waiter on a hot day. 
True, you may make him bring your order 
under covered dishes, but even so, there is 
still that suggestion of rain on a tin roof that 
is distasteful to so many. 

So I repeat that fat people are always get- 
ting the worst of it, and I say again, of all 
the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst is the 
flesh itself. As the poet says — ^^The world, 
the flesh and the devil" — and there you have 
it in a sentence — the flesh in between, catch- 
ing the devil on one side and the jeers of the 
world on the other. I don't care what Dr. 
Woods Hutchinson or any other thin man 
says! I contend that history is studded with 
instances of prominent persons who lost out 
because they got fat. Take Cleopatra now, 
the lady to whom Marc Antony said: ^^I 
am dying, Egypt, dying," and then re- 
frained from doing so for about nineteen 
more stanzas. Cleo or Pat — she was known 
by both names, I hear — did fairly well as a 



Tummies 29 



queen, as a coquette and as a promoter of 
excursions on the river — until she fleshened 
up. Then she flivvered. Doctor Johnson 
was a fat man and he suffered from prickly 
heat, and from Boswell, and from the fact 
that he couldn't eat without spilling most 
of the gravy on his second mezzanine land- 
ing. As a thin and spindly stripling Na- 
poleon altered the map of Europe and stood 
many nations on their heads. It was after he 
had grown fat and pursy that he landed on 
St. Helena and spent his last days on a bar- 
ren rock, with his arms folded, posing for 
steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had 
a lot of hard luck in keeping his relatives — 
they were almost constantly dying on him — 
and he finally had to stab himself with one 
of those painful-looking old Roman two- 
handed swords, lest something really seri- 
ous befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost 
the favor of kings in the last act. Coming 
down to our own day and turning to a point 
no farther away than the White House at 
Washington — but have we not enough ex- 
amples without becoming personal? 

Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me 



30 Cobb^s Anatomy 



have men about me that are fat." But you 
bet it wasn't in the heated period when J, 
Caesar said that! 



Cobb''s Anatomy 



TEETH 




Cobb's Anatomy 



Teeth 

ONE OF THE MOST pleasant fea- 
tures about being born, as I con- 
ceive it, is that we are born without 
teeth. I believe there have been a few ex- 
ceptions to this rule — Richard the Third, 
according to the accounts, came into the 
world equipped with all his teeth and a per- 
fectly miserable disposition; and once in a 
while, especially during Roosevelt years, 
when the Colonel's picture is hanging on 
the walls of so many American homes, we 
read in the paper that a baby has just been 
born somewhere with a full set, and even, 
as in the case of the infant son of a former 
member of the Rough Riders, with nose 
glasses and a close-cropped mustache. This, 
however, may have been a pardonable ex- 
aggeration of the real facts. As I recall 
now, it was reported in a dispatch to the 



36 Cobb^s Anatomy 

New York Tribune from Lover's Leap, 
Iowa, during the presidential campaign 
eight years ago. 

In the main, though, we are born with- 
out teeth. We are born without a number 
of things — clothes for example— although 
Anthony Comstock is said to be pushing a 
law requiring all children to be born with 
overalls on; but teeth is the subject which 
we are now discussing. This absence of 
teeth tends to give the very young of our 
species the appearance in the face of an old 
fashioned buckskin purse with the draw 
string broken, but be that as it may, we are 
generally fairly well content with life until 
the teeth begin to come. 

First there are the milk teeth. Right 
there our troubles start. To use the term 
commonly in use, we cut them, although as 
a matter of fact, they cut us — cut them with 
the aid of some such mussy thing as a tooth- 
ing ring or the horny part of the nurse's 
thumb, or the reverse side of a spoon — cut 
them at the cost of infinite suffering, not 
only for ourselves but for everybody else 
in the vicinity. And about the time we get 




*«**^ 




"CUT THEM ^\^ITH SOME SUCH MUSSY THING AS- 
THE HORNY PART OF A NURSE'S THUMB" 



Teeth 39 

the last one in we begin to lose the first one 
out. They go one at a time, by falling out, 
or by being yanked out, or by coming out of 
their own accord when we eat molasses 
tafify. They were merely what you might 
call our Entered Apprentice teeth. We go 
in now for the full thirty-two degrees — one 
degree for each tooth and thirty-two teeth 
to a set. By arduous and painful processes, 
stretching over a period of years, we get 
our regular teeth — the others were only 
volunteers — concluding with the wisdom 
teeth, as so called, but it is a misnomer, be- 
cause there never is room for them and they 
have to stand up in the back row and they 
usually arrive with holes in them, and if we 
really possessed any wisdom we would fig- 
ure out some way of abolishing them alto- 
gether. They come late and crowd their 
way in and push the other teeth out of line 
and so we go about for months with the top 
of our mouths filled with braces and wires 
and things, so that when we breathe hard 
we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an 
Aeolean harp. 

But in any event we get them all and no 



40- Cobb^s Anatomy 

sooner do we get them than we begin to lose 
them. They develop cavities and aches and 
extra roots and we spend a good part of 
our lives and most of our substance with the 
dentist. Nevertheless, in spite of all we 
can do and all he can do, we keep on losing 
them. And after awhile, they are all gone 
and our face folds up on us like a crush 
hat or a concertina and from our brow to 
our chin we don't look much more than a 
third as long as we used to look. We dis- 
like this folded-up appearance naturally — 
who wouldn't? And we get tired of living 
on spoon victuals and the memory of past 
beef-steaks. So we go and get some false 
ones made. They have to be made to order; 
there appears to be no market for custom 
made teeth; you never see any hand-me- 
down teeth advertised, guaranteed to fit any 
face and withstand a damp climate. Get- 
ting them made to order is a long and un- 
happy process and I will pass over it briefly. 
Having got them, we find that they do not 
fit us or that we do not fit them, which 
comes to the same thing. The dentist makes 
them fit by altering us some and the teeth 




AND OUR FACE FOLDS UP ON US LIKE A 
CRUSH HAT OR A CONCERTINA" 



Teeth 43 

some, and after some months they quit feel- 
ing as though they didn't belong to us but 
had been borrowed temporarily from some- 
body's loan collection of ceramics. 

But just about the time they are becom- 
ing acclimated and we are getting used to 
them, the interior of our mouth for private 
reasons best known to itself changes around 
materially and we either have to go back 
and start all over and go through the whole 
thing again, or else haply we die and pass 
on to the bourne from which no traveller re- 
turneth either with his teeth or without 
them. If Shakespeare had only thought of 
it — and he did think of a number of things 
from time to time — he might have divided 
his Seven Ages of Man much better by 
making them the Seven Ages of Teeth as 
follows: First age — no tooth; second age 
— milk teeth; third age — losing 'em; fourth 
age — getting more teeth; fifth age — losing 
'em; sixth age — getting false teeth and find- 
ing they aren't satisfactory; seventh age — 
toothless again. 

I knew a man once who was a gunsmith 
and lost all his teeth at a comparatively 



44 Cobb^s Anatomy 

early age. He went along that way for 
years. He had to eschew the tenderloin for 
the reason that he couldn't chew it, and he 
had to cut out hickory nut cake and corn on 
the ear and such things. But there is noth- 
ing about the art of gunsmithing which 
seems to call for teeth, so he got along very 
well, living in a little house with the wife 
of his bosom and a faithful housedog named 
Ponto. But when he was past sixty he went 
and got himself some teeth from the dentist. 
He did this without saying anything about 
it at home; he was treasuring it up for a 
surprise. The corner stone was laid in May 
and the scaffolding was all up by July and 
in August the new teeth were dedicated 
with suitable ceremonies. 

They altered his appearance materially. 
His nose and chin which had been on terms 
of intimacy now rubbed each other a last 
fond good-bye and his face lost that accor- 
dian-pleated look and straightened out and 
became about six or seven inches longer 
from top to bottom. He now had a sort of 
determined aspect like the iron jawed lady 
in a circus, whereas before his face had the 




"PONTO CAME OUT - - - AND BIT HIM SEVERELY 
IN THE CALF OF THE LEG" 



Teeth 41 

appearance of being folded over and wad- 
ded down inside of his neck band, so his hat 
could rest comfortably on his collar. He 
knew he was altered, but he didn't realize 
how much he was altered until he went 
home that evening and walked proudly in 
the front gate. His wife who was timid 
about strangers, slammed the door right in 
his face and faithful Ponto came out from 
under the porch steps and bit him severely 
in the calf of the leg. There was only one 
consolation in it for him — for the first time 
in a long number of years he was in position 
to bite back. 

And that's how it is with teeth — with 
your teeth let us say — for right here I'm 
going to drop the personal pronoun and 
speak of them as your teeth from now on. 
If anybody has to sufifer it might as well be 
you and not me; I expect to be busy telling 
about it. As I started to say awhile ago, you 
— remember it's you from this point — you 
get your regular teeth and they start right 
in giving you trouble. Every little while 
one of them bursts from its cell with a hor- 
rible yell and in the lulls between pangs you 



48 Cobb^s Anatomy 

go forth among men with the haunted look 
in your eye of one who is listening for the 
footfalls of a dread apparition, and one- 
half of your head is pufifed out of plumb as 
though you were engaged in the whimsical 
idea of holding an egg plant in the side of 
your jaw. A kind friend meets you, and, 
speaking with that high courage and that 
lofty spirit of sacrifice which a kind friend 
always exhibits when it's your tooth that is 
kicking up the rumpus and not his, he tells 
you you ought to have something done for 
it right away. You know that as well as he 
does, but you hate to have the subject 
brought up. It's your toothache anyhow. 
It originated with you. You are its proud 
parent but not so awfully proud at that. 
Mother and child doing as well as could be 
expected, but not expected to do very well. 
But these friends of yours keep on shoving 
their free advice on you and the tooth keeps 
on getting worse and worse until the pain 
spreads all through the First Ward and 
finally you grab your resolution in both 
hands to keep it from leaking out between 
your fingers and you go to the dentist's. 




"LISTENING FOR THE FOOTFALLS 
OF A DREAD APPARITION" 



Teeth 51 

This happens so many times that aftei 
awhile you lose count and so would the den- 
tist, if he didn't write your name down 
every time in his little red book with pleas- 
ingly large amounts entered opposite to it. 
It seems to you that you are always doing 
something for your teeth? You have them 
pulled and pushed and shoved and filled 
and unfilled and refilled and excavated and 
blasted and sculptured and scroll-sawed 
and a lot of other things that you wouldn't 
think could be done legally without a build- 
ing permit. As time passes on, the inside 
of your once well-filled and commodious 
head becomes but little more than a recent 
site. Your vaults have been blown and 
most of your contents abstracted by Amal- 
gam Mike and Dental Slim, the Demon 
Yeggmen of the Human Face. You are 
merely the scattered clews left behind for 
the authorities to work on; you are the. 
faint traces of the fiendish crime. You are 
the point marked X. 

But all along there is generally one tooth 
that has behaved herself like a lady. Other 
teeth may have betrayed your confidence 



52 Cobb'^s Anatomy 

but Old Faithful has hung on, attending to 
business, asking only for standing room and 
kind treatment. The others you may view 
with alarm, but to this tooth you can point 
with pride. But have a care — she is de- 
ceiving you. 

Some night you go to bed and have a 
dream. In your dream it seems to you that 
a fox terrier is chasing a woodchuck around 
and around the inside of your head. In that 
tangled sort of fashion peculiar to dreams 
your sympathy seems to go out first to the 
fox terrier and then to the woodchuck as 
they circle about nimbly, leaping from your 
tonsils to your larynx and then up over the 
rafters in the roof of your mouth and down 
again and pattering over the sub-maxillary 
from side to side. But about then you wake 
up with a violent start and decide that any 
sympathy you may have in stock should be 
reserved for personal use exclusively, be- 
cause at this moment the dog trees the 
woodchuck at the base of that cherished 
tooth of yours and starts to dig him out. 
He is a determined dog and very active, 





AT THIS MOMENT THE DOG TREES THE WOODCHUCK 
AT THE BASE OF THAT CHERISHED TOOTH" 



Teeth 55 

but he needs a manicure. You are struck 
by that fact almost immediately. 

Uttering some of those trite and common- 
place remarks that are customary for use 
under such circumstances and yet are so 
futile to express one's real sentiments, you 
arise and undertake to pacify the infuriated 
creature with household remedies. You try 
to lure him away with a wad of medicated 
cotton stuck on the end of a parlor match. 
But arnica is evidently an acquired taste 
with him. He doesn't seem to care for it 
any more than you do. You begin to dress, 
using one hand to put your clothes on with 
and the other to hold the top of your head 
on. At this important juncture, the dog 
tears down the last remaining partitions and 
nails the woodchuck. The woodchuck is 
game — say what you will about the habits 
and customs of the woodchuck you have to 
hand it to him there — he's game as a lion. 
He fights back desperately. Intense excite- 
ment reigns throughout the vicinity. While 
the struggle wages you get your clothes on 
and wait for daylight to come, which it 
does in from eight to ten weeks. Norway is 



56 Cobb^s Anatomy 

not the only place where the nights are 
six months long. 

There is nobody waiting at the dentist's 
when you get there, it being early. You are 
willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be 
different but at a dentist's you are always 
willing to wait, like a gentleman. But the 
sinewy young man who is sitting in the 
front parlor reading the Hammer Throw- 
er's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air 
of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the 
circumstances and invites you to step right 
in. He tells you that you are next. This 
is wrong — if you were next you would turn 
and flee like a deer. Not being next, you 
enter. Right from the start you seem to 
take a dislike to this young man. You 
catch him spitting in his hands and hitching 
his sleeves up as you are hanging up your 
hat. Besides he is too robust for a dentist. 
With those shoulders he ought to be a 
boiler maker or a safe mover or something 
of that sort. You resolve inwardly that 
next time you go to a dentist you are going 
to one of a more lady-like bearing and 
gentler demeanor. It seems a brutal thing 



Teeth 57 

that a big strong man should waste his years 
in a dental establishment when the world is 
clamoring for strong men to do the heavy 
lifting jobs. But before you can say any- 
thing, this muscular athlete has laid violent 
hands on your palpitating form and wad- 
ded it abruptly into the hideous embraces 
of a red plush chair, which looks something 
like the one they use up at Sing Sing, only 
it's done more quickly up there and with 
less suffering on the part of the condemned. 
On one side of you you behold quite a dis- 
play of open plumbing and on the other 
side a tasty exhibit of small steel tools of 
assorted sizes. No matter which way your 
gaze may stray you'll be seeing something 
attractive. 

You also take notice of an electric motor 
about large enough, you would say, to run 
a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a 
sinister and forbidding way. They are con- 
stantly making these little improvements in 
the dental profession. I have heard that 
fifty years ago a dentist traveled about over 
the country from place to place, sometimes 
pulling a tooth and sometimes breaking a 



58 Cobb^s Anatomy 

colt. He practiced his art with an outfit con- 
sisting of two pairs of iron forceps — one pair 
being saber-toothed while the other pair was 
merely saw-fretted — and he gave a man the 
same kind of treatment he gave a horse, only 
he tied the horse's legs first. But now elec- 
tricity is in general use and no dentist's 
establishment is complete without a dyna- 
mo attachment which makes a crooning 
sound when in operation and provides in- 
strumental accompaniment to the song of 
the official canary. 

I know why a barber in a country town 
is always learning to play on the guitar and 
I know why a man with an emotional 
Adam's apple always wears an open front 
collar. I know these things, but am debar- 
red from telling them by reason of a solemn 
oath. But I have not yet been able to dis- 
cover why every dentist keeps a canary in 
his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as 
you settle your neck back on a head rest 
that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil, 
and just as a dentist climbs into you as far 
as the arm pits and begins probing at the 
bottom of a tooth which has roots extending 



Teeth 59 

back behind your ears, like an old-fash- 
ioned pair of spectacles, that the canary 
bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone 
and dash into a melodious outburst of two 
hundred thousand twitters, all of them 
being twitters of the same size, shape, and 
color. For that matter, I don't even know 
what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although 
I should say from the shape of his bone as 
used by the canary instead of a pocket 
handkerchief, that he is circular and flat 
and stands on edge only with the utmost 
difficulty. If you will pardon my tempor- 
ary digressions into the realm of natural 
history, we will now return to the main sub- 
ject, which was your tooth. 

The moment the muscular young man 
starts up his motor and gives the canary its 
music cue and begins pawing over his tool 
collection to pick out a good sharp one, you 
recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, and 
so does the tooth. Neither one of you ever 
felt better. The fox terrier must have 
killed the woodchuck and then committed 
suicide. You are about to mention this 
double tragedy and beg the young man's 



60 Cobb^s Anatomy 

pardon for causing him any trouble and ex- 
cuse yourself and go away, but just then he 
quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly 
siezes you by your features and undoes them. 
If you are where you can catch a glimpse of 
yourself in a mirror you will immediately 
note how much the human face divine can 
be made to look like an old-fashioned red 
brick Colonial fire place. 

There are likely to be several things you 
would like to talk about. You are full of 
thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing 
you want to tell him you don't think the 
brand of soap he uses on his hands is going 
to agree with you at all. You probably 
don't care personally for the way your bar- 
ber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's 
thumb is Peaches Melba alongside of a 
dentist's. Before you can say anything 
though he discovers a cavity or orifice of 
some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems 
to give him pleasure. Filled with intense 
gratification by this discovery and fired 
moreover by the impetuous ardor of the 
chase, he grabs up a crochet needle with a 
red hot stinger on the end of it and jabs it 



Teeth 61 

down your tooth to a point about opposite 
where your suspenders fork in the back. 

You have words with him then^ or at 
least you start to have words with him, but 
he puts his knee in your chest and tells you 
that it really doesn't hurt at all, but is only 
your imagination, and utters other soothing 
remarks of that general nature. He then 
exchanges the crochet needle for a kind of 
an instrument with a burr on the end of it^ 
This instrument first came into use at the 
time of the Spanish Inquisition but has 
since been greatly improved on and brought 
right up to date. He takes this handy little 
utensil and proceeds to stir up your imagin- 
ation some more. You again try to say 
something, speaking in a muffled tone, but 
he is not listening. He is calling to a broth- 
er assassin in the adjoining room to come 
and see a magnificent example of a prime 
old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the 
Second Grave Digger rests his tools against 
the palate of his victim and comes in. 

As nearly as you can gather from hearsay 
evidence, you not being an eye witness your- 
self, one of them harpoons the nerve just 



62 Cobb^s Anatomy 

back of the gills with a nutpick — remember 
please it is your nerve that they are taking 
all these liberties with — and pulls it out of 
its retreat and the other man takes a tack 
hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any 
time he misses the nerve he hits you, so his 
average is still a thousand, and it is fine 
practice for him. A pleasant time is had 
by everybody present except you and the 
nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs 
around your breastbone and hangs on des- 
perately. You perspire freely and make 
noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a 
Swedish folk song while holding a spoonful 
of hot mush in his mouth. 

In time becoming wearied even of these 
congenial diversions and tiring of the shop 
talk that has been going on, the second den- 
tist returns to his original prey and the 
party who has you in charge tries a new ex- 
periment. He arms himself with a kind of 
an automatic hammering machine, some- 
what similar to the steam riveter used in 
constructing steel office buildings, except 
that this one is more compact and can de- 
liver about eighty-five more blows to the 



Teeth 63 

second. Thus equipped, he descends far 
below your high water mark and engages in 
aquatic sports and pastimes for a consider- 
able period of time. It seems to you that 
you never saw a man who could go down 
and stay down as long as this young man 
can. You begin to feel that you misjudged 
his real vocation in life when you decided 
that he ought to be a boiler maker. You 
know that he was intended for pearl fish- 
ing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. 
He doesn't even have to come up to breathe, 
but stays below, knee deep in your tide 
wash, merrily knocking chunks off your 
lowermost coral reefs with his little steam 
riveter and having a perfectly lovely time. 

You are overflowing copiously and you 
wish he would take the time to stop and 
bail you out. You abhor the idea of being 
drowned as an inside job. But no, he keeps 
right on and along about here it is custom- 
ary for you to swoon away. 

On recovering, you observe that he has 
changed his mind again. He is now going 
in for amateur theatricals and is using 
you for a theatre. First thoughtfully drap- 



64 Cobb^s Anatomy 

ing a little rubber drop curtain across your 
proscenium arch to keep you from seeing 
what is going on behind your own scenes, 
he is setting the stage for the thrilling saw- 
mill scene in Blue Jeans. You can dis- 
tinctly feel the circular saw at work and 
you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket 
of hot tar and one thing and another that 
have been left in the wings. You also judge 
that the insulation is burning off of an elec- 
tric fixture somewhere up stage. 

All this time the tooth is still offering 
resistance, and eventually the dentist comes 
out in front once more and makes a little 
curtain speech to you. He has just ascer- 
tained that what the tooth really needed was 
not filling but pulling. He thought at 
first that it should be filled, and that is what 
he has been doing — filling it — but now he 
knows that pulling is the indicated proced- 
ure. He does not understand how a tooth 
that seemed so open could have deceived 
him. Nevertheless he will now pull the 
tooth. 

He pulls her. She does her level best 
but he pulls her. He harvests small sections 



Teeth 6S 

of the gum from time to time and occasion- 
ally he stops long enough to loosen up the 
roots as far down as your floating ribs. But 
he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull 
that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not 
able subsequently to remember what they 
were. You utter various loud sounds in a 
strange and incomprehensible language and 
he lays back and braces his knees against 
your lower jaw, and the tooth utters the 
death rattle and begins picking the cover- 
lid. And then he gives one final heave and 
breaks the roots away from the lower part 
of your spinal column to which they were 
adhering, and emerges into the open pant- 
ing but triumphant, and holds his trophy 
up for you to look at. If you didn't know^ 
it was your tooth you would take it for an 
old-fashioned china cuspidor that had 
been neglected by the janitor. 

It was a tooth that you had been prizing 
for years, but now you wouldn't have it as 
a gracious gift. You are through with that 
tooth forever. You never want to see it 
again. 

As for the dentist, he collects the fixed 



66 Cobb^s Anatomy 

charge for stumpage and corkage and one 
thing and another and you come away with 
a feeling in the side of your jaw like a va- 
cant lot. Your tongue keeps going over 
there to see if it can recognize the old place 
by the hole where the foundations used to 
be. You never realized before what a base- 
ment there was to a tooth. 

As you come out you pass a fresh victim 
going in and you see the dentist welcome 
him and then turn to crank up his motor 
and you hear the canary tuning up with a 
new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are 
glad that he is the one who is going in and 
that you are the one who is coming out. 

Science tells us that the teeth are the hard- 
est things in the human composition, which 
is all very well as far as it goes, but what 
science should do is to go on and finish the 
sentence. It means the hardest to keep. 



Cobb''s Anatomy 



HAIR 




Cobb's ylnatomy 



Hair 

As I REMARKED in the preceding 
chapter of this work, one of the 
b pleasantest features about being 
born is that we are born without teeth and 
other responsibilities. Teeth, like debts and 
installment payments, come along later on. 
It is the same way with hair. 

Born, we are, hairless or comparatively 
so. We are in a highly incomplete state 
at that period of our lives. It takes a fond 
and doting parent to detect evidences of an 
actual human aspect in us. Only the ears 
and the mouth appear to be up to the plans 
and specifications. There is a mouth which 
when opened, as it generally is, makes the 
rest of the face look like a tire, and there is 
a pair of ears of such generous size that only 
a third one is needed, round at the back 
somewhere, to give us the appearance of a 



12 Cobb^s Anatomy 

loving cup. And we are smocked and hem- 
stitched with a million wrinkles apiece, 
more or less, which partly accounts for the 
fact that every newborn infant looks to be 
about two hundred years old. And uni- 
formly we have the nice red complexion of 
a restaurant lobster. You know that live- 
broiled look? 

As for our other features, they are more 
or less rudimentary. Of a nose there is only 
what a chemist would call a trace. It seems 
hard to imagine that a dinky little nubbin 
like that, a dimple turned inside out, as it 
were, will ever develop into a regular nose, 
with a capacity for freckling in the summer 
and catching cold in the winter — a nose 
that you can sneeze through and blow with. 
There are no eyebrows to speak of either, 
and the skull runs up to a sharp point like 
a pineapple cheese. Just back of the peak 
is a kind of soft, dented-in place like a 
Parker House roll, and if you touch it we 
die. In some cases this spot remains soft 
throughout life, and these persons grow up 
and go through railroad trains in presi- 
dential years taking straw votes. 




"IT TAKES A FOND AND DOTING PARENT TO DETECT 
EVIDENCES OF AN ACTUAL HUMAN ASPECT IN US" 



Hair 75 

And, as I said before, there isn't any hair; 
only on the slopes of the cheese are some 
very pale, faint, downy lines, which look as 
though they had been sketched on lightly 
with a very soft drawing pencil and would 
wipe ofif readily. That, however, is the 
inception and beginning of what afterward 
becomes, among our race, hair. To look at 
it you could hardly believe it, but it is. Bar- 
ring accidents or backwardness, it continues 
to grow from that time on through our 
childhood, but its behavior is always a pro- 
found disappointment. If the child is a girl 
and, therefore, entitled to curly hair, her 
hair is sure to come in stifif and straight. 
If it's a boy, to whom curls will be a curse 
and a cross of affliction, he is morally cer- 
tain to be as curly as a frizzly chicken, 
and until he gets old enough to rebel he 
will wear long ringlets and boys of his 
acquaintance will insert cockle-burs and 
chewing gum into his tresses, and he will 
be known popularly as Sissie and other- 
wise his life with be made joyous and care- 
free for him. If a reddish tone of hair is 
desired it is certain to grow out yellow 



16 Cobb^s Anatomy 

or brown or black; and if brown is your 
favorite shade you are absolutely sure to be 
nice and red-headed, with eyebrows and 
lashes to match, and so many cowlicks that 
when you remove your hat people will think 
you're wearing two or three halos at once. 
Hair rarely or never acts up to its advance 
notices. 

One of the earliest and most painful recol- 
lections of my youth is associated with hair. 
I still tingle warmly when I think of it. 
I should say I was about eight years old 
at the time. My mother sent me down 
the street to the barber's to have my hair 
trimmed — shingled was the term then used. 
Some of my private collection of cowlicks 
had begun to stand up in a way that invited 
adverse criticism and reminded people of 
sunbursts. They made me look as though 
my hair were trying to pull itself out by 
the roots and escape. So I was sent to the 
barber's. My little cousin, two years 
younger, went along in my charge. It was 
thought that the performance might enter- 
tain her. I was mounted in a chair and had 
a cloth tucked in round my neck, like a self- 



Hair 77 

made millionaire about to eat consomme. 
The officiating barber got out a shiny steel 
instrument with jaws — the first pair of clip- 
pers I had ever seen — and he ran this up 
the back of my neck, producing a most 
agreeable feeling. He reached the top of 
my head and would have paused, but I told 
him to go right ahead and clip me close all 
over, which he did. When he had finished 
the job I was so delighted with the sensation 
and with the attendant result as viewed in 
a mirror that I suggested he might give my 
little cousin a similar treat. From a mere 
child I was ever so — willing always to share 
my simple pleasures with those about me, 
especially where it entailed no inconvenience 
on my part. I told him my father would 
pay the bill for both of us when he came 
by that night. 

The barber fell in with the suggestion. 
It has ever been my experience that a 
barber will fall in readily with any sug- 
gestion whereby the barber is going to 
get something out of it for himself. In 
this instance he was going to get another 
quarter, and a quarter went farther in 



18 Cobb'^s Anatomy 

those days than it does now. I dismounted 
from the chair and my innocent little 
cousin was installed in my place. As 
I now recall she made no protest. The 
barber ran his clippers conscientiously and 
painstakingly over her tender young scalp, 
while I stood admiringly by and watched 
the long yellow curls fall writhing upon 
the floor at my feet. It seemed to me that 
a great and manifest improvement was pro- 
duced in her general appearance. Instead 
of being hampered by those silly curls dang- 
ling down all round her face, she now had a 
round, slick, smooth dome decorated with a 
stiff yellowish stubble, and the skin showed 
through nice and pink and the ears were 
well displayed, whereas before they had 
been practically hidden. She was also 
relieved of those foolish bangs hanging down 
in her eyes. This, I should have stated, 
occurred in the period when womankind 
of whatsoever age and also some men wore 
bangs, a disease from which all have since 
recovered with the exception of racehorses 
and princesses of the various reigning houses 
of Europe. And now my little cousin was 







WHILE I STOOD ADMIRINGLY BY AND WATCHED THE 
LONG YELLOW CURLS FALL WRITHING UPON THE FLOOR 



Hair 81 

shut of those annoying bangs, and her fore- 
head ran up so high that you had to go 
round behind her to see where it left ofif. 

Filled with a joyous sense of achievement 
and conscious of a kindly deed worthily per- 
formed, I took my little cousin by her hand 
and led her home. 

My mother was waiting for us at the front 
door. She seemed surprised when I took ofif 
my hat and gave her a look, but that wasn't 
a circumstance to her surprise when I 
proudly took ofif my little cousin's cap. She 
uttered a kind of a strangled cry and my 
cousin's mother came running, and the way 
she carried on was scandalous and illtimed. 
I will draw a veil over the proceedings of 
the next few minutes. At the time it would 
have been a source of great personal grati- 
fication and comfort to me if I could have 
drawn a number of veils, good, thick, 
woolen ones, over the proceedings. My 
mother wept, my aunt wept, my little cousin 
wept, and I am not ashamed to state that I 
wept quite copiously myself. But I had 
more provocation to weep than any of them. 



82 Cobb^s Anatomy 

When this part of the affair was over my 
mother sent me back to the barber with a 
message. I was to say that a heart-broken 
woman demanded to have the curls of 
which her darling child had been denuded. 
I believe that there was some idea enter- 
tained of sewing them into a cap and re- 
quiring my cousin to wear the cap until 
new ones had sprouted. Even to me, a mere 
child of eight, this seemed a foolish and to- 
tally unnecessary proceeding, but the situa- 
tion had already become so strained that I 
thought it the part of prudence to go at 
once without offering any arguments of my 
own. I felt, anyhow, that I would rather 
be away from the house for a while, until 
calmer second judgment had succeeded ex- 
citement and tumult. 

The man who owned the barber shop 
seemed surprised when I delivered the mes- 
sage, but he told me to come back in a few 
minutes and he'd do what he could. I 
drifted on down to the confectionery store 
at the corner to forget my sorrows for the 
moment in a worshipful admiration of a 
display of prize boxes and cracknels in 




i^ 



'^ 



I ^' 'M « 



PP 




" THE WAY SHE CARRIED ON 

WAS SCANDALOUS AND ILL-TIMED 



Hair 85 

glass-front cases — you should be able to fix 
the period by the fact that cracknels and 
prize boxes were still in vogue among the 
young. When I returned the head barber 
handed me quite a large box — a shoebox — 
with a string tied round it. It did not seem 
possible to me that my cousin could have 
had a whole shoebox full of curls, but 
things had been going pretty badly that 
afternoon and my motives had been mis- 
judged and everything, so without any talk 
I took the box and hurried home with it. 
My mother cut the string and my aunt 
lifted the lid. 

I should prefer again to draw a veil over 
the scenes that now ensued, but the necessity 
of finishing this narrative requires me to 
state that it being a Saturday and the head 
barber being a busy man, he had not taken 
time to sort out my cousin's curls from 
among the flotsam and jetsam of his estab- 
lishment, but had just swept up enough off 
the floor to make a good assorted boxful. I 
think the oldest inhabitant had probably 
dropped in that day to have himself trim- 
med up a little round the edges. I seem to 



86 Cobb^s Anatomy 

remember a quantity of sandy whiskers shot 
with gray. There was enough hair in that 
box and enough different kinds and colors of 
hair and stuff to satisfy almost any taste, you 
would have thought, but my mother and 
aunt were anything but satisfied. On the 
contrary, far from it. And yet my cousin's 
hair was all there, if they had only been 
willing to spend a few days sorting it out 
and separating it from the other contents. 

In this particular instance I was the ex- 
ception to the rule, that hair generally gives 
a boy no great trouble from the time he 
merges out of babyhood until he puts on 
long pants and begins to discern something 
strangely and subtly attractive about the sex 
described by Mr. Kipling as being the more 
deadly of the species. During this interim 
it is a matter of no moment to a boy whether 
he goes shaggy or cropped, shorn or un- 
shorn. At intervals a frugal parent trims 
him to see if both his ears are still there, or 
else a barber does it with more thorough- 
ness, often recovering small articles of 
household use that have been mysteriously 
missing for months ; but in the main he goes 



Hair 82_ 

along carefree and unbarbered, not greatly 
concerned with putting anything in his head 
or taking anything off of it. 

In due season, though, he reaches the age 
where adolescent whiskers and young ro- 
mance begin to sprout out on him simulta- 
neously — and from that moment on for the 
rest of his life his hair is giving him bother, 
and plenty of it. 

Your hair gives you bother as long as you 
have it and more bother when it starts to go. 
You are always doing something for it and 
it is always showing deep-dyed ingratitude 
in return; or else the dye isn't deep enough, 
which is even worse. Hair is responsible 
for such byproducts as dandruff, barbers, 
wigs, several comic weeklies, mental an- 
guish, added expense, Chinese revolutions, 
and the standard joke about your wife's 
using your best razor to open a can of to- 
matoes with. Hair has been of aid to Buf- • 
falo Bill, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Samson, 
The Lady Godiva, Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced 
Boy, poets, pianists, some artists and most 
mattress makers, but a drawback and a sor- 



88 Cobb^s Anatomy 

row to Absalom, polar bears in captivity 
and the male sex in general. 

This assertion goes not only for hair on 
the head but for hair on the face. Let us 
consider for a moment the matter of shav- 
ing. If you shave yourself you excite a 
barber's contempt, and there is nobody 
whose contempt the average man dreads 
more than a barber's, unless it is a waiter's. 
And on the other hand, if you let a barber 
shave you he excites not your contempt par- 
ticularly, but your rage and frequently your 
undying hatred. Once in a burst of confi- 
dence a barber told me one of the trade 
secrets of his profession — he said that 
among barbers every face fell into one of 
three classes, it being either a square, a 
round or a squirrel. I know not, reader, 
whether yours be a square or a round or a 
squirrel, but this much I will chance on a 
venture, sight unseen — that you have your 
periods of intense unhappiness when you 
are being shaved. 

I do not refer so much to the actual pro- 
cess of being shaved. Indeed there is some- 
thing restful and soothing to the average 




"EVERY FACE FELL INTO ONE OF THREE CLASSES, IT BEING 
EITHER A SQUARE, A ROUND OR A SQUIRREL" 



Hair 91 

male adult in the feel of a sharp razor being 
guided over a bristly jowl by a deft and 
skillful hand, to the accompaniment of a 
gentle grating sound and followed by a sen- 
sation of transient silken smoothness. Nor 
do I refer to the barber's habit of conversa- 
tion. After all, a barber is human — he has 
to talk to somebody, and it might as well be 
you. If he didn't have you to talk to he'd 
have to talk to another barber, and that 
would be no treat to him. 

What I do refer to is that which precedes 
a shave and more especially that which fol- 
lows after it. You rush in for a shave. In 
ten minutes you have an engagement to be 
married or something else important, and 
you want a shave and you want it quick. 
Does the barber take cognizance of the 
emergency? He does not. Such would be 
contrary to the ethics of his calling. Know- 
ing from your own lips that you want a 
shave and that's positively all, he neverthe- 
less is instantly filled with a burning desire 
to equip you with a large number of other 
things. In this regard the barbering pro- 
fession has much in common with the hab- 



92 Cobb^s Anatomy 

erdashering or gents'-furnishing profession 
as practiced in our larger cities. You in- 
vade a haberdashering establishment for the 
purpose, let us say, of investing in a plain 
and simple pair of half hose, price twenty- 
five cents. That emphatically is all that 
you do desire. You so state in plain, 
simple language, using the shorter and 
uglier word socks. 

Does the youth in the pale mauve shirt 
with the marquise ring on the little finger 
of the left hand rest content with this? Need 
I answer this question? In succession he 
tries to sell you a fancy waistcoat with 
large pearl buttons, a broken lot of silk pa- 
jamas, a bath-robe, some shrimp-pink un- 
derwear — he wears this kind himself he 
tells you in strict confidence — a pair of 
plush suspenders and a knitted necktie that 
you wouldn't be caught wearing at twelve 
o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal mine 
during a total eclipse of the moon. If you 
resist his blandishments and so far forget 
that you are a gentleman as to use harsh 
language, and if you insist on a pair of 
socks and nothing else, he'll let you have 



Hair 93_ 

them, but he will never feel the same to- 
ward you as he did. 

'Tis much the same with a barber. You 
need a shave in a hurry and he is willing 
that you should have a shave, he being there 
for that purpose, but first and last he can 
think of upward of thirty or forty other 
things that you ought to have, including a 
shampoo, a hair cut, a hair singe, a hair 
tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial mas- 
sage, a scalp massage, a Turkish bath, his 
opinion on the merits of the newest White 
Hope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, 
and a series of comparisons of the weather 
we are having this time this month with the 
weather we were having this time last 
month. Not all of us are gifted with the 
power of repartee by which my friend Fris- 
bee turned the edge of the barber's desires. 

^^Your hair," said the barber, fondling a 
truant lock, ^4s long." 

^^I know it is," said Frisbee. ^^I like it 
long. It's so Roycrofty." 

^^It is very long," said the barber with a 
wistful expression. 

"I like it very long," said Frisbee, ''I 



94 Cobb^s Anatomy 

like to have people come up to me on the 
street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask 
me how I left my sisters? I like to be mis- 
taken for a Russian pianist. I like for 
strangers to stop me and ask me how's every- 
thing up at East Aurora. In short, I like 
it long." 

^^Yes, sir," said the barber, ^^quite so, sir; 
but it's very long, particularly here in the 
back — it covers your coat collar." 

^^Indeed?" said Frisbee. ^^You say it 
covers my coat collar?" 

^/Yes, sir," said the barber. ^^You can't 
see the coat collar at all." 

^^Have you got a good sharp pair of shears 
there?" said Frisbee. 

^^Oh, yes, sir," said the barber. 

^^All right then," said Frisbee; ^^cut the 
collar ofif." 

But not all of us, as I said before, have 
this ready gift of parry and thrust that dis- 
tinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we 
weakly surrender. Or if we refuse to sur- 
render, demanding just a shave by itself 
and nothing else, what then follows? In 
my own case, speaking personally, I know 



Hair 95 

exactly what follows. I do not like to have 
any powder dabbed on my face when I am 
through shaving. I believe in letting the 
bloom of youth show through your skin^ 
providing you have any bloom of youth to 
do so. I always take pains to state my views 
in this regard at least twice during the oper- 
ation of being shaved — once at the start 
when the barber has me all lathered up, 
with soapsuds dripping from the flanges of 
my shell-like ears and running down my 
neck, and once again toward the close of 
the operation, when he has laid aside his 
razor and is sousing my defenseless features 
in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deal 
like those scented pink blotters they used to 
give away at drug-stores to advertise some- 
body's cologne. 

Does the barber respect my wishes in this 
regard? Certainly not. He insists on pow- 
dering me, either before my eyes or surrep- 
titiously and in a clandestine manner. If 
he didn't powder me up he would lose his 
sense of self-respect, and probably the union 
would take his card away from him. I 
think there is something in the constitution 



96 Cobb'^s Anatomy 

and by-laws requiring that I be powdered 
up. I have fought the good fight for years, 
but Fm always powdered. Sometimes the 
crafty foe dissembles. He pretends that he 
is not going to powder me up. But all of a 
sudden when my back is turned, as it were, 
he grabs up his powder swab and makes a 
quick swoop upon me and the hellish deed 
is done. I should be pleased to hear from 
other victims of this practice suggesting any 
practical relie<f short of homicide. I do not 
wish to kill a barber — there are several other 
orders in ahead, referring to the persons I 
intend to kill ofif first — but I may be driven 
to it. 

After he has gashed me casually hither 
and yon, and sluiced down my helpless 
countenance with the carefree abandon of 
a livery-stable hand washing ofif a buggy, 
and after, as above stated, he has covered up 
the traces of his crime with powder, the bar- 
ber next takes a towel and folds it over his 
right hand, as prescribed in the rules and 
regulations, and then he dabs me with that 
towel on various parts of my face nine hun- 
dred and seventy-four — 974 — separate and 




^VHEN MY BACK IS TURNED HE GRABS UP HIS POAVDER 
SWAB AND MAKES A QUICK S^VOOP UPON ME " 



Hair 99 

distinct times. I know the exact number of 
dabs because I have taken the trouble to 
keep count. I may be in as great a hurry as 
you can imagine; I may be but a poor ner- 
vous wreck already, as I am ; I may be quiv- 
ering to be up and away from there, but he 
dabs me with his towel — he dabs me until 
reason totters on her throne — sometimes just 
a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be 
that the whole cerebral structure is involved 
— and then when he is apparently all 
through the Demoniac Dabber comes back 
and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate 
and premeditated dab, making nine hun- 
dred and seventy-five dabs in all. He has to 
do it; it's in the ritual that I and you and 
everybody must have that last dab. I won- 
der how many gibbering idiots there are in 
the asylum today whose reason was over- 
thrown by being dabbed that last farewell 
dab. I know from my own experience that 
I can feel the little dark-green gibbers slosh- 
ing round inside of me every time it hap- 
pens, and some day my mind wiU'give away 
altogether and there'll be a hurry call sent 
in for the wagon with the lock on the back 



100 Cobb^s Anatomy 

door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or pro- 
test; we cannot hope to escape; we can only 
sit there in mute and helpless misery and be 
filled with a great envy for Mexican hair- 
less dogs. 

For quite a spell now we have been speak- 
ing of hair on the face; at this point we re- 
vert to hair in its relation to the head. 
There are some few among us, mainly pro- 
fessional Southerners and leading men, who 
retain the bulk of the hair on their heads 
through life; but with most of us the cir- 
cumstances are different. Your hair goes 
from you. You don't seem to notice it at first; 
then all of a sudden you wake up to the 
realization that your head is working its 
way up through the hair. You start in then 
desperately doing things for your hair in the 
hope of inducing it to stick round the old 
place a while longer, but it has heard the 
call of the wild and it is on its way. There's 
no detaining it. You soak your skull in lo- 
tions until your brain softens and your hat- 
band gets moldy from the damp, but your 
hair keeps right on going. 

After a while it is practically gone. If 



Hair 101 

only about two-thirds of it is gone your head 
looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; 
but if most of it goes there is something 
about you that suggests the Glacial Period, 
with an icy barren peak rising high above 
the vegetation line, where a thin line of 
heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You 
are bald then, a subject fit for the japes of 
the wicked and universally coupled in the 
betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs 
and with the front row of orchestra chairs 
at a musical show. 

At this time of writing baldness is creep- 
ing insidiously up each side of my head. It 
is executing flank movements from the tem- 
ples northward, and some day the two col- 
umns will meet and after that Til be con- 
siderably more of a highbrow than I am 
now. At present I am craftily combing the 
remaining thatch in the middle and smooth- 
ing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those 
bare spots covered — thinly perhaps, but nev- 
ertheless covered. It is my earnest desire 
to continue to keep them covered. I am not 
a professional beauty; I am not even 
what you would call a good amateur 



102 Cobb^s Anatomy 



beauty; and I want to make what little 
hair I have go as far as it conveniently 
can. But does the barber to whom I 
repair at frequent intervals coincide with 
my desires in this respect? Again I reply 
he does not. Every time I go in I speak 
to him about it. I say to him: ^Woodman, 
spare that hair, touch not a single strand; 
in youth it sheltered me and I'll protect it 
now." Or in substance that. 

He says yes, he will, but he doesn't mean 
it. He waits until he can catch me with my 
guard down. Then he seizes a comb, and 
using the edge of his left hand as a bevel and 
operating his right with a sort of free-arm 
Spencerian movement, he roaches my hair 
up in a scallop effect on either side, and 
upon reaching the crest he fights with it and 
wrestles with it until he makes it stand erect 
in a feather-edged design. I can tell by his 
expression that he is pleased with this ar- 
rangement. He loves to send his victims 
forth into the world tufted like the fretful 
cockatoo. He likes to see surging waves of 
hair dash high on a stern and rockbound 



Hatr 103 

head. His sense of the artistic demands 
such a result. 

What cares he how I feel about it so long 
as the higher cravings of his own nature 
are satisfied? But I resent it — I resent it 
bitterly. I object to having my head look 
like a real-estate development with an open- 
ing for a new street going up each side and 
an ornamental design in fancy landscape 
gardening across the top. If I permit this 
I won't be able to keep on saying that I was 
twenty-seven on my last birthday, with some 
hope of getting away with it. So I insist 
that he put my front hair right back where 
he found it. He does so, under protest and 
begrudgingly, it is true, but he does it. And 
then, watching his opportunity, he runs in 
on me and overpowers me and roaches it up 
some more. 

If I weaken and submit he is happy as 
the day is long. If he gets it roached up 
on both sides that will make me look like a 
horizontal-bar performer, which is his idea 
of manly beauty. Or if he gets it roached 
up on one side only there is still some con- 
solation in it for him — I'm liable to be 



104 Cobb^s Anatomy 

mistaken anywhere for a trained-animal 
performer. But once in a very great while 
he doesn't get it roached up on either side, 
but has to stand there and suffer as he sees 
me walk forth into the world with my hair 
combed to suit me and not him. I can tell 
by his look that he is grieved and downcast, 
and that he will probably go home and be 
cross to the children. He has but one solace 
— he hopes to have better luck with me next 
time. And probably he will. 

The last age of hair is a wig. But wigs 
are not so very satisfactory either. I've 
seen all the known varieties of wigs, and I 
never saw one yet that looked as though it 
were even on speaking terms with the head 
that was under it. A wig always looks as 
though it were a total stranger to the head 
and had just lit there a minute to rest, pre- 
paratory to flying along to the next head. 
Nevertheless, I think on the whole I'll be 
happier when my time comes to wear one, 
because then no barber can roach me up. 



Cohb^s Anatomy 



HANDS AND FEET 




Cobb's ylnatomy 



Hands and Feet 

NEARLY every boy has a period in 
his life when he is filled with an en- 
vious admiration for the East India 
god with the extra set of arms — Vishnu, I 
think this party's name is. To a small boy 
it seems a grand thing to have a really ade- 
quate assortment of hands. He considers 
the advantage of such an arrangement in 
school — two hands in plain view^ above the 
desk holding McGuffy's Fourth Reader at 
the proper angle for study and the other 
two out of sight, down underneath the desk 
engaged in manufacturing paper wads or 
playing crack-a-loo or some other really 
worth while employment. 

Or for robbing birds' nests. There would 
be two hands for use in skinning up the 
tree, and one hand for scaring ofif the 
mother bird and one hand for stealing the 



110 Cobb^s Anatomy 



eggs. And for hanging on behind wagons 
the combination positively could not be 
beaten. Then there would be the gaudy 
conspicuousness of going around with four 
arms weaving in and out in a kind of spid- 
ery effect while less favored boys were 
forced to content themselves with just an 
ordinary and insufficient pair. Really, 
there was only one drawback to the contem- 
plation of this scheme — there'd be twice as 
many hands to wash when company was 
coming to dinner. 

Generally speaking a boy's hands give 
him no serious concern during the first few 
years of his life except at such times as his 
mother grows officious and fussy and insists 
that they ought to be washed up as far as 
the regular place for washing a boy's hands, 
to wit, about midway between the knuckles 
and the wrist. The fact that one finger is 
usually in a state of mashedness is no draw- 
back, but a benefit. The presence of a 
soiled rag around a finger gives to a boy's 
hand a touch of distinctiveness — singles 
it out from ordinary unmaimed hands. Its 
presence has been known to excuse its happy 



m^^ y^ / 




. / 




THERE'D BE TWICE AS MANY HANDS TO WASH 
WHEN COMPANY WAS COMING TO DINNER" 



Hands and Feet 113 

possessor from such chores as bringing in 
wood for the kitchen stove or pulling dock 
weeds out of the grass in a front yard where 
it would be much easier and quicker to 
pull the grass out of the dock weeds. It may 
even be made a source of profit by removing 
the wrappings and charging two china mar- 
bles a look. I seem to recall that in the case 
of a specially attractive injury, such as a 
thumb nail knocked ofif or a deep cut which 
has refused to heal by first intention or an 
imbedded splinter in process of being 
drawn out by a scrap of fat meat, that as 
much as four china marbles could be 
charged. 

On the Fourth of July you occasionally 
burned your hands and in cold winters they 
chapped extensively across the knuckles but 
these were but the marks and scars of hon- 
orable endeavor and a hardy endurance. 
In our set the boy whose knuckles had the 
deepest cracks in them was a prominent and 
admired figure, crowned, as you might say, 
with an imaginery chaplet by reason of his 
chaps. 

With girls, of course, it was different. 



114 Cobb^s Anatomy 

Girls were superfluous and unnecessary 
creatures with a false and inflated idea of 
the value of soap and water. Their hands 
weren't good for much anyway. Later on 
we discovered that a girl's hands were ex- 
cellent for holding purposes in a hammock 
or while coming back from a straw ride, 
but I am speaking now of the earlier stages 
of our development, before the presence of 
the ostensibly weaker sex began to awaken 
responsive throbs in our several bosoms — in 
short when girls were merely nuisances and 
things to be ignored whenever possible. In 
that early stage of his existence hands have 
no altruistic or sentimental or ornamental 
value for a boy — they are for useful pur- 
poses altogether and are regarded as such. 

It is only when he has reached the age 
of tail coats and spike-fence collars that he 
discovers two hands are frequently too 
many and often not enough. They are too 
many at your first church wedding when 
you are wearing your first pair of white 
kids and they are not enough at a five 
o'clock tea. There is a type of male who 
can go to a five o'clock tea and not fall 




"THE PRESENCE OF A SOILED RAG ROUND A FINGER 
GIVES TO A BOY'S HAND A TOUCH OF DISTINCTIVENESS' 



Hands and Feet 11 7 

over a lot of Louie Kahn's furniture or get 
himself hopelessly tangled up in a hanging 
drapery and who can seem perfectly at ease 
while holding in his hands a walking stick, 
a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart 
hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel 
in it, a tea spoon, a lump of sugar, a seed 
cookie, an olive, and the hand of a lady with 
whom he is discussing the true meaning of 
the message of the late Ibsen; but these 
gifted mortals are not common. They are 
rare and exotic. There are also some few 
who can do ushing at a church wedding with 
a pair of white kids on and not appear 
overly self-conscious. These are also the 
exceptions. The great majority of us suffer 
visibly under such circumstances. You 
have the feeling that each hand weighs fully 
twenty-four pounds and that it is hanging 
out of the sleeve for a distance of about one 
and three-quarters yards and you don't know 
what to do with your hands and on the 
whole would feel much more comfortable 
and decorative if they were both sawed ofif 
at the wrists and hidden some place where 
you couldn't find 'em. You have that feel- 



118 Cobb^s Anatomy 

ing and you look it. You look as though 
you were working in a plaster of paris fac- 
tory and were carrying home a couple of 
large sacks of samples. It would be grand 
to be a Vishnu at a five o'clock tea, but aw- 
ful to be one at a church wedding. 

About the time you find yourself em- 
barking on a career of teas and weddings 
you also begin to find yourself worrying 
about the appearance of your hands. Up 
until now the hands have given you no great 
concern one way or the other, but some day 
you wake to the realization that you need to 
be manicured. Once you catch that disease 
there is no hope for you. There are ways of 
curing you of almost any habit except mani- 
curing. You get so that you aren't satisfied 
unless your nails run down about a quarter 
of an inch further than nails were originally 
intended to run, and unless they glitter 
freely you feel strangely distraught in com- 
pany. Inasmuch as no male creature's 
finger nails will glitter with the desired de- 
gree of brilliancy for more than twenty- 
four short and fleeting hours after a treat- 
ment you find yourself constantly in the act 




THESE GIFTED MORTALS ARE NOT COMMON 



Hands and Feet 121 

of either just getting a manicure or just 
getting over one. It is an expensive habit, 
too; it takes time and it takes money. 
There's the fixed charge for manicuring in 
the first place and then there's the tip. 
Once there was a manicure lady who 
wouldn't take a tip, but she is now no more. 
Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death 
with hat pins and nail-files. Manicuring 
as a public profession is a comparatively 
recent development of our civilization. The 
fathers of the republic and the founders of 
the constitution, which was founded first 
and has been foundering ever since if you 
can believe what a lot of people in Congress 
say — they knew nothing of manicuring. 
Speaking by and large, they only got their 
thumbs wet when doing one of three things 
— taking a bath, going in swimming or turn- 
ing a page in a book. Washington probably 
was never manicured nor Jefiferson nor 
Franklin; it's a cinch that Daniel Boone and 
Israel Putnam and George Rogers Clark 
weren't and yet it is generally conceded that 
they got along fairly well without it. But 
as the campaign orators are forever pointing 



122 Cobb^s Anatomy 

out from the hustlers and the forum, this 
is an age calling for change and advance- 
ment. And manicuring is one of the 
advancements that likewise calls for the 
change — for fifty cents in change anyhow 
and more if you are inclined to be generous 
with the tip. 

Shall you ever forget your first manicure? 
The shan'ts are unanimously in the majority. 
It seems an easy thing to walk into a mani- 
cure parlor or a barber shop and shove your 
hands across a little table to a strange young 
woman and tell her to go ahead and shine 
'em up a bit — the way you hear old veteran 
manicurees saying it. It seems easy, I say, 
and looks easy; but it isn't as easy as it 
seems. Until you get hardened, it requires 
courage of a very high order. You, the 
abashed novice, see other men sitting in the 
front window of the manicure shop just as 
debonair and cozy as though they'd been 
born and raised there, swapping the ready 
repartee of the day with dashing creatures 
of a frequently blonde aspect, and you 
imagine they have always done so. You 
little know that these persons who are now 




"^VE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH OUR HANDS 



Hands and Feet 12 S 

appearing so much at home and who can 
snap out those bright, witty things like ^^I 
gotcher Steve," and '^Well, see who's here?" 
without a moment's hesitation and without 
having to stop and think for the right word 
or the right phrase but have it right there 
on the tip of the tongue — you little reck 
that they too passed through the same 
initiation which you now contemplate. Yet 
such is the case. 

You have dress rehearsals — private ones 
— in your room. In the seclusion of your 
bed chamber you picture yourself opening 
the door of the marble manicure hall and 
stepping in with a brisk yet graceful tread — 
like James K. Hackett making an entrance 
in the first act — and glancing about you 
casually — like John Drew counting up the 
house — and saying ^^Hello girlies, how're 
all the little Heart's Delights this after- 
noon?" just like that, and picking out the 
most sumptuous and attractive of the flat- 
tered young ladies in waiting; and sinking 
easily into the chair opposite her — see 
photos of William Faversham — and throw- 
ing the coat lapels back, at the same time 



126 Cobb^s Anatomy 

resting the left hand clenched upon the up- 
per thigh with the elbow well out — Donald 
Brian asking a lady to waltz — and offering 
the right hand to the favored female and 
telling her to go as far as she likes with it. 
It sounds simple when you figuring it out 
alone, but it rarely works out that way in 
practice. It is my belief that every woman 
longs for the novelty of a Turkish bath and 
every man for the novelty of a manicure 
long before either dares to tackle it. I may 
be wrong but this is my belief. And in the 
case of the man he usually makes a num- 
ber of false starts. * 
You go to the portals and hesitate and 
then, stumbling across the threshold, you 
either dive on through to the barber shop — 
if there is a barber shop in connection — or 
else you mumble something about being in 
a hurry and coming back again, and retreat 
with all the grace and ease that would be 
shown by a hard shell crab that was trying 
to back into the mouth of a milkbottle. 
You are likely to do this several times ; but 
finally some day you stick. You slump 
down into one of those little chairs and ofifer 



Hands and Feet 121 

your hands or one of them to a calm and 
slightly arrogant looking young lady and 
you tell her to please shine them up a little. 
You endeavor to appear as though you had 
been doing this at frequent periods stretch- 
ing through a great number of years, but 
she — bless her little heart! — she knows bet- 
ter than that. The female of the manicur- 
ing species is not to be deceived by any such 
cheap and transparent artifices. If you 
wore a peekaboo waist she couldn't see 
through you any easier. Your hands would 
give you away if your face didn't. In a 
sibulent aside, she addresses the young lady 
at the next table — the one with the nine 
bracelets and the hair done up delicatessen 
store mode — sausages, rolls and buns — - 
whereupon both of them laugh in a signifi- 
cant, silvery way, and you feel the back of 
your neck setting your collar on fire. You 
can smell the bone button back there scorch- 
ing and you're glad it's not celluloid, cellu- 
loid being more inflammable and subject to 
combustion when subjected to intense heat. 
When both have laughed their merry 



128 Cobb^s Anatomy 

fill, the young woman who has you in charge 
looks you right in the eye and says: 

^^Dearie me; you'll pardon me saying so, 
but your nails are in a perfectly turrible 
state. I don't think I've seen a jumpman's 
nails in such a state for ever so long= Par- 
don me again — but how long has it been 
since you had them did?" 

To which you reply in what is meant to 
be a jaunty and off-hand tone: 

^^Oh quite some little while. I've — I've 
been out of town." 

^^That's what I thought/' she says with a 
slight shrug. It isn't so much what she says 
— it's the way she says it, the tone and all 
that, which makes you feel smaller and 
smaller until you could crawl into your own 
watch pocket and live happily there ever 
after. There'd be slews of room and when 
you wanted the air of an evening you could 
climb up in a buttonhole of your vest and 
be quite cosy and comfortable. But shrink 
as you may, there is now no hope of escape, 
for she has reached out and grabbed you 
firmly by the wrist. She has you fast. You 
have a feeling that eight or nine thousand 




I DON'T THINK I'VE SEEN A JUMPMAN'S NAILS 
IN SUCH A STATE FOR EVER SO LONG" 



Hands and Feet 131 

people have assembled behind you and are 
all gazing fixedly into the small of your 
back. The only things about you that havn't 
shrivelled up are your hands. You can feel 
them growing larger and larger and redder 
and redder and more prominent and con- 
spicuous every instant. 

The lady begins operations. You are as- 
tonished to note how many tools and imple- 
ments it takes to manicure a pair of hands 
properly. The top of her little table is full 
of them and she pulls open a drawer and 
shows you some more, ranged in rows. 
There are files and steel biters and pigeon- 
toed scissors and scrapers and polishers and 
things ; and wads of cotton with which to 
staunch the blood of the wounded, and bot- 
tles of liquid and little medicinal looking 
jars full of red paste; and a cut glass crock 
with soap suds in it and a whole lot of little 
orange wood stobbers. 

In the interest of truth I have taken the 
pains to enquire and I have ascertained 
that these stobbers are invariably of orange 
wood. Say what you will, the orange tree 
is a hardy growth. Every February you 



132 Cobb^s Anatomy 

read in the papers that the Florida orange 
crop, for the third consecutive time since 
Christmas has been entirely and totally de- 
stroyed by frost and yet there is always an 
adequate supply on hand of the principal 
products of the orange — phosphate for the 
soda fountains, blossoms for the bride, polit- 
ical sentiment for the North of Ireland and 
little sharp stobbers for the manicure lady. 
Speaking as an outsider I would say that 
there ought to be other •varieties of wood 
that would serve as well and bring about the 
desired results as readily — a good thorny 
variety of poison ivy ought to fill the bill, 
I should think. But it seems that orange 
wood is absolutely essential. A manicure 
lady could no more do a manicure properly 
without using an orange wood stobber at 
certain periods than a cartoonist could draw 
a picture of a man in jail without putting 
a ball and chain on him or a summer resort 
could get along without a Lover's Leap 
within easy walking distance of the hotel. 
It simply isn't done, that's all. 

Well, as I was saying, she gets out her 
tool kit and goes to work on you. You 



Hands and Feet 133 

didn't dream that there were so many things 
— mainly of a painful nature — that could be 
done to a single finger nail and you flinch 
as you suddenly remember that you have 
ten of them in all, counting thumbs in with 
fingers. She takes a finger nail in hand and 
she files it and she trims it and she softens 
it with hot water and hardens it with chemi- 
cals and parboils it a little while and then 
she cuts off the hang nails — if there aren't 
any hang nails there already she'll make a 
few — and she shears away enough extra 
cuticle to cover quite a good-sized little 
boy. She goes over you with a bristle brush, 
and warms up your nerve ends until you 
tingle clear back to your dorsal fin and then 
she takes one of those orange wood stobbers 
previously referred to, and goes on an ex- 
ploring expedition down under the nail, 
looking for the quick. She always finds it. 
There is no record of a failure to find the 
quick. Having found it she proceeds to 
wake it up and teach it some parlor tricks. 
I may not have set forth all these various 
details in the exact order in which they take 
place, but I know she does them all. And 



134 Cobb'^s Anatomy 

somewhere along about the time when she 
is half way through with the first hand she 
makes you put the other hand in the suds. 

Later on when you have had more prac- 
tice at this thing you learn to wait for the 
signal before plunging the second hand into 
the suds, but being green on this occasion, 
you are apt to mistake the moving of the 
crock of suds over from the right hand side 
to the left hand side as a notice and to poke 
your untouched hand right in without fur- 
ther orders, hoping to get it softened up well 
so as to save her trouble in trimming it down 
to a size which will suit her. But this is 
wrong — this is very wrong, as she tells you 
promptly, with a pitying smile for your 
ignorance. Manicure girls are as careful 
about boiling a hand as some particular peo- 
ple are about boiling their eggs for breakfast 
of a morning. A two minute hand is no 
pleasure to her absolutely if she has diag- 
nosed your hand as one calling for six min- 
utes, or vice versa. So, should you err in this 
regard she will snatch the offending hand 
out and wipe it off and give it back to you 
and tell you to keep it in a dry place until 



Hands and Feet 135 

she calls for it. Manicure girls are very 
funny that way. 

Thus time passes on and on and by de- 
grees you begin to feel more and more at 
home. Your bashfulness is wearing off. 
The coherent power of speech has returned 
to you and you have exchanged views with 
her on the relative merits of the better known 
brands of chewing gum and which kind 
holds the flavor longest, and you have 
swapped ideas on the issue of whether 
ladies should or should not smoke cigarettes 
in public and she knows how much your 
stick pin cost you and you know what her 
favorite flower is. You are getting along 
fine, when all of a sudden she dabs your 
nails with a red paste and then snatches up 
a kind of a polishing tool and ferociously 
rubs your fingers until they catch on fire. 
Just when the conflagration threatens to be- 
come general she stops using the polisher 
and proceeds to cool down the ruins by 
gently burnishing your nails against the 
soft, pink palm of her hand. You like this 
better than the other way. You could ignite 
yourself by friction almost any time, if you 



136 Cobb^s Anatomy 

got hold of the right kind of a chamois skin 
rubber, but this is quite different and highly 
soothing. You are beginning to really en- 
joy the sensation when she roguishly pats 
the back of your hand — pitty pat — as a sig- 
nal that the operation is now over. You 
pay the check and tip the lady — tip her 
fifty cents if you wish to be regarded as a 
lovely jumpman or only twenty-five cents 
if you are satisfied with being a vurry nice 
fella — and you secure your hat and step 
forth into the open with the feeling of one 
who has taken a trip into a distant domain 
and on the whole has rather enjoyed it. 

You stand in the sunlight and waggle 
your fingers and you are struck with the 
desirable glitter that flits from finger tip to 
finger tip like a heleograph winking on a 
mountain top. It is indeed a pleasing spec- 
tacle. You decide that hereafter you will 
always glitter so. It is cheaper than wearing 
diamonds and much more refined, and so 
you take good care of your fingers all that 
day and carefully refrain from dipping them 
in the brine while engaged in the well known 



Hands and Feet 137 

indoor sport of spearing for dill pickles at 
the business men's lunch. 

But the next morning when you wake up 
the desirable glitter is gone. You only 
glimmer dully — your fingers do not sparkle 
and dazzle and scintillate as they did. As 
Francois Villon, the French poet would 
undoubtedly have said had manicures been 
known at the time he was writing his poems, 
^Where are the manicures of yesterday?" 
instead of making it, ^Where are the snows 
of yesteryear?" there being no answer ready 
for either question, except that the mani- 
cures of yesterday like the snows of yester- 
year are never there when you start looking 
for them. They have just naturally got up 
and gone away, leaving no forwarding ad- 
dress. 

You have now been launched upon your 
career as a manicuree. You never get over 
it. You either get married and your wife 
does your nails for you, thus saving you 
large sums of money, but failing to impart 
the high degree of polish and the spice of 
romance noticed in connection with the 



138 Cobb'^s Anatomy 

same job when done away from home, or 
you continue to patronize the regular es- 
tablishments and become known in time as 
Polished Percival, the Pet of the Manicure 
Parlor. But in either event your hands 
which once were hands and nothing more, 
have become a source of added trouble and 
expense to you. 

Speaking of hands naturally brings one 
to the subject of feet, which was intended 
originally to be the theme for the last half 
of this chapter, but unfortunately I find 
I have devoted so much space to your hands 
that there is but little room left for your 
feet and so far as your feet are concerned, 
we must content ourselves on this occasion 
with a few general statements. 

Feet, I take it, speaking both from ex- 
perience and observation, are even more 
trouble to us than hands are. There are 
still a good many of us left who go through 
life without doing anything much for our 
hands but with our feet it is different. They 
thrust themselves upon us so to speak, de- 
manding care and attention. This goes for 



Hands and Feet 139 

all sizes and all ages of feet. From the time 
you are a small boy and suffer from stone 
bruises in the summer and chilblains in the 
winter, on through life you're beset with 
corns and callouses and falling of the in- 
step and all the other ills that feet are heir 
to. 

The rich limp with the gout, the moder- 
ately well to do content themselves with an 
active ingrown nail or so, and the poor man 
goes out and drops an iron casting on his 
toe. Nearly every male who lives to reach 
the voting age has a period of mental weak- 
ness in his youth when he wears those 
pointed shoes that turn up at the ends, like 
sleigh runners; and spends the rest of his 
life regretting it. Feet are certainly un- 
grateful things. I might say that they are 
proverbially ungrateful. You do for them 
and they do you. You get one corn, hard 
or soft, cured up or removed bodily and a 
whole crowd of its relatives come to take 
its place. I imagine that Nature intended 
we should go barefooted and is now get- 
ting even with us because we didn't. Our 



140 CobPs Anatomy 

poor, painful feet go with us through all 
the years and every step in life is marked 
by a pang of some sort. And right on up 
to the end of our days, our feet are getting 
more infirm and more troublesome and 
more crotchety and harder to bear with all 
the time. How many are there right now 
who have one foot in the grave and the 
other at the chiropodist's? Thousands, I 
reckon. 

Napoleon said an army traveled on its 
stomach. I don't blame the army, far from 
it; I've often wished I could travel that way 
myself, and I've no doubt so has every other 
man who ever crowded a number nine and 
three-quarters foot into a number eight pa- 
tent-leather shoe, and then went to call on 
friends residing in a steam-heated apart- 
ment. As what man has not? Once the 
green-corn dance was an exclusive thing 
with the Sioux Indians, but it may now be 
witnessed when one man steps on another 
man's toes in a crowd. 

We are accustomed to make fun of the 
humble worm of the dust but in one respect 



Hands and Feet 141 

the humble worm certainly has it on us. 
He goes through existence without any 
hands and any feet to bother him. Indeed 
in this regard I can think of but one crea- 
ture in all creation who is worse off than 
we poor humans are. That is the lowly ear 
wig. Think of being an ear wig, that suf- 
iers from fallen arches himself and has a 
wife that suffers from cold feet! 




■d'"^ 



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H^' * 



